Excerpts from President Ramaphosa’s 2019 SONA Address:

“We will expand our high tech industry by ensuring that the legal and regulatory framework promotes innovation, scaling up skills development for young people in new technologies, and reducing data costs. Wherever we have gone young people have continuously raised the issue of the excessive high data costs in South Africa.

To provide impetus to this process, within the next month, the Minister of Communications will issue the policy direction to Icasa to commence the spectrum licensing process.

This process will include measures to promote competition, transformation, inclusive growth of the sector and universal access.

This is a vital part of bringing down the costs of data, which is essential both for economic development and for unleashing opportunities for young people.

We call on the telecommunications industry further to bring down the cost of data so that it is in line with other countries in the world.

We will continue to develop programmes to ensure that economically excluded young people are work ready and absorbed into sectors where ‘jobs demand’ is growing.

These sectors include global business processing services, agricultural value chains, technical installation, repair and maintenance and new opportunities provided through the digital economy and the fourth industrial revolution.

Government will support tech-enabled platforms for self-employed youth in rural areas and townships.

We also have to prepare our young people for the jobs of the future.

This is why we are introducing subjects like coding and data analytics at a primary school level.

If we are to reinvigorate the implementation of the National Development Plan, we must cast our sights on the broadest of horizons.

We want a South Africa wherein all enjoy comfort and prosperity.

But we also want a South Africa where we stretch our capacities to the fullest as we advance along the superhighway of progress.

We want a South Africa that has prioritised its rail networks, and is producing high-speed trains connecting our megacities and the remotest areas of our country.

We should imagine a country where bullet trains pass through Johannesburg as they travel from here to Musina, and they stop in Buffalo City on their way from Ethekwini back here.

We want a South Africa with a high-tech economy where advances in e-health, robotics and remote medicine are applied as we roll out the National Health Insurance.

We want a South Africa that doesn’t simply export its raw materials but has become a manufacturing hub for key components used in electronics, in automobiles and in computers.

We must be a country that can feed itself and that harnesses the latest advances in smart agriculture.

I dream of a South Africa where the first entirely new city built in the democratic era rises, with skyscrapers, schools, universities, hospitals and factories.

This dream has been fueled by my conversations with four people: Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Dr Naledi Pandor, Ms Jessie Duarte and President Xi Jinping, whose account of how China is building a new Beijing has helped to consolidate my dream.

Has the time not arrived to build a new smart city founded on the technologies of the 4th Industrial Revolution?

I would like to invite South Africans to begin imaging this prospect.STATE OF THE NATION ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT CYRIL RAMAPHOSA